Sunday morning, when my congregation began singing Andrae Crouch’s song “Bless the Lord,” my mind wasn’t on the song so much as it was on Baton Rouge.

Ted Jackson / The Times-PicayuneBelle Chase First Baptist Church member Marie Keeton sheds tears on Sept. 18, 2005, as she and the congregation sing "Blessed be the name of the Lord" during the Church's first service after Hurricane Katrina.

It was at Second Baptist Church in that city on Sept. 4, 2005, that I struggled to join its congregation in the song of praise. Then, as the date no doubt indicates, my mind was on New Orleans.

It was the seventh day of the crisis. The storm had come on Monday, giving Louisiana a glancing blow before striking the Mississippi Gulf Coast head on. I didn’t know that afternoon that so many levees and floodwalls had broken, but from my vantage point on the elevated interstate, I saw people holding on to flotsam or grabbing onto anything they could thought might help them get high enough to breathe.

For those of us who had sought refuge at the newspaper’s plant on Howard Avenue, the water came in the dark of night. By dawn Tuesday we were surrounded, and by mid-morning we had escaped in the holds of the paper’s delivery trucks. My truck dumped us out in Baton Rouge.

Another truck made a U-turn back toward New Orleans, where reporters saw the Walmart on Tchoupitoulas being looted. Police officers who weren’t looting the store themselves were allowing others to have at it.

Wednesday brought more chaos. Reports of looting multiplied.

Thursday Dennis Hastert, then the speaker of the House, said rebuilding New Orleans “doesn’t make sense to me.” Times-Picayune reporter Gordon Russell and visiting photographer Marko Georgiev were manhandled and threatened by New Orleans police and temporarily had their notebook and camera seized. Then-Gov. Kathleen Blanco said she expected the National Guard en route to New Orleans would be shooting to kill.

Tens of thousands of people were trapped at the Louisiana Superdome and the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center with no way out. On Friday, Karen Carter, then a state representative, said New Orleans had but two pressing needs: “Don’t give me your money,” she said. “Don’t send me $10 million today. Give me buses and gas. Buses and gas. Buses and gas. If you have to commandeer Greyhound, commandeer Greyhound.… If you don’t get a bus, if we don’t get them out of there, they will die.”

By Saturday, officials said, all those trapped at the Convention Center and Superdome had been evacuated. Peace and calm had been restored.

Then came Sunday morning at my cousin’s church and the congregational hymn taken verbatim from Psalm 103:1. The refrain was particularly hard to sing. Hard because I was weeping and hard because it really didn’t feel like the best time to be singing “He has done great things.”

How much harder it would have been to sing if I knew that as I worshiped at Second Baptist, New Orleans police officers were rushing to the Danziger Bridge where, according to authorities, they would kill two and maim four innocent and unarmed civilians.

Singing the song Sunday didn’t trigger flashbacks, as I feared it might, meaning it didn’t make me as sad as I felt that morning in Baton Rouge. I don’t know if I can feel that sad again. I pray I don’t, at least.

But singing the song — much more easily this time — did prompt reflection, the kind of reflection I assume most of us who were here in 2005 will be doing as the fifth anniversary of Katrina approaches.

As bad as Katrina was, I know that the attention of the country and world has not been continually fixed on New Orleans these five years. At the same time, there’s that nagging feeling that this Aug. 29 will be the last time Katrina will be considered news outside our immediate area.

While in Houston in January 2006, a worshiper at a church there presaged the nation’s loss of interest. He asked me how long I thought it would take for New Orleans to recover.

I hesitated but then decided to give him my honest — and truth be told, conservative — estimate. I shrugged my shoulders. “Ten years?”

He laughed in disbelief. “Oh, it’s not gonna be that long,” he said.

Perhaps what he was telling me was he wasn’t prepared to stay concerned that long.

And that’s the fear that’s been awakened by the approach of this fifth anniversary: that many of us will still be crying years hence and nobody will care but us.